NEAR Sandbox lets you easily run a local NEAR blockchain.

NEAR Sandbox is a custom build of the NEAR blockchain optimized for local development and testing. If you're familiar with Ganache for Ethereum, this is similar.

This repository contains code to quickly install pre-built binaries of NEAR Sandbox for multiple programming languages (currently just NodeJS; Rust coming soon) and operating systems (currently just Intel-based Macs and Debian/Ubuntu-flavored Linux distros using Intel processors).

If you just want to run tests against a NEAR Sandbox instance, check out near-workspaces for your favorite language:

• JavaScript
• Rust

Tip: near-runner includes near-sandbox as a dependency, so you will not need to install or run near-sandbox on its own.

If you want to run NEAR Sandbox on its own, continue reading.

npm i -g near-sandbox

Note: If you have trouble downloading binary from IPFS gateway, you can upload a pre-built near-sandbox tar file to any file storage service and use SANDBOX_ARTIFACT_URL environment variable to specify it's base URL. e.g. > SANDBOX_ARTIFACT_URL=https://s3.aws.com/my-binary npm i near-sandbox

Coming soon

• Install Rust with correct build target

• Clone nearcore

  git clone https://github.com/near/nearcore
  

• cd into your nearcore folder and run make sandbox

  cd nearcore
  make sandbox
  

• For ease-of-use, you can copy (or symlink) the binary to somewhere in your PATH. For example, if you have a ~/bin folder:

  cp target/debug/near-sandbox ~/bin/
  

• Initialize the Sandbox node

  near-sandbox --home /tmp/near-sandbox init
  

• Run it

  near-sandbox --home /tmp/near-sandbox run
  

To find out other things you can do:

near-sandbox --help

Once you're finished using the sandbox node you can stop it by using CtrlC. To clean up the data it generates:

rm -rf /tmp/near-sandbox

NEAR Sandbox includes custom features to make tweaking local and test environments easier.

• sandbox_patch_state RPC call, used by patchState in runner-js, useful for making arbitrary state mutations on any contract or account